Avoid the mistake of assuming your customers behave like you!

When you plan your marketing, do you base it on your own experience, or on objective data from the market?

Unfortunately much of my time is spent advising clients – who should know better – not to fall into the trap of only doing what they like to do.

Yet robust data, rigorously collected, tells us what the market thinks; and most marketers are not the market – in fact many of them are not even close to their market!

This is something I have to contend with every single day: so-called marketers wanting us to run a campaign in a particular way, because it’s what they do in their own lives. Social media is the obvious contender for this particular straightjacket, but it could easily be exhibitions, PR, advertising in particular media or many other tactics – I’ve experienced them all.

So my thanks go to Mark Ritson at Marketing Week – surely one of the greatest marketing journalists around – for his demolition of subjective decision making in marketing. He words it far more humorously, eloquently and persuasively than I ever could, and I recommend this as a full 5 minute read that will change your approach to marketing.

He does it through the old method of attacking his main competitor: Gary Vaynerchuk in this case, who has millions of followers on the various social platforms and so is well positioned to inflict a lot of harm onto us gullible marketers.

Gary Vaynerchuk is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about media

As Gary Vaynerchuk continues to dominate much of the debate on marketing around the globe, our branding columnist suggests he is wrong – repeatedly – about the respective value of TV and social media.